okay i know i know i gotta get it together because this is a real important episode we're making chocolate cookies possibly the greatest dessert of all time hey everyone i'm claire welcome to my home kitchen today i am making chocolate chip cookies i don't know why it took this long to get to this recipe but i really felt like as the steward of everyone's most beloved baked good i had a lot of work to do and i'm very proud of my childhood cookie so i'm going to show you how i make it no mixer required
[Music] i really wanted a cookie with a crispy edge a chewy gooey center and the right balance between the butterscotchy flavors from vanilla and brown sugar and all the chocolate mix in it's a very easy recipe but it has some very specific points within the process that's not like they're fussy but it's just like i'm very particular about little tiny tweaks to get what for me is the ideal chocolate chip cookie so that means things like using two different kinds of chocolate i like to fold in milk chocolate and dark chocolate chopping some of the
chocolate so you get big pieces and then like little smaller bits folded in and very importantly browning the butter so why is yours the best though good question cal mine is the best because i think it has the right balance of chocolate to dough i like the mix of milk and dark chocolates because for me too much dark chocolate is too intense and i don't enjoy it and it has the best texture the crispiest edge the chewiest center and so much flavor from brown butter plus tons of salt tons of salt that's another key but
there's lots of those little moments throughout the recipe that all add up to make for me what is a superlative chocolate chip cookie [Music] no special equipment no mixer it was important to me that this recipe be makable by hand for pretty much anyone so i'm just going to use a bowl a whisk a spatula and then i need a saucepan for making the brown butter a couple sheet trays for baking and if you have one a two ounce scoop if you don't have one you can use a quarter cup measure ingredients pretty straightforward i
have butter two large eggs a little baking soda two tablespoons heavy cream you could also use milk kosher salt vanilla extract granulated sugar dark brown sugar all-purpose flour and then milk chocolate and dark chocolate baking discs so this milk chocolate is i think like a 40 to 45 something like that which is actually relatively dark for milk and then this is a semi-sweet chocolate i think of 64 i couldn't find milk chocolate baking disks so i just got a bar and i chopped them up but i'm actually going to chop it up even more i'll
tell you why [Music] i have a heat proof spatula which i use because i like to scrape the butter mixture and stir it around constantly that is to prevent any of the milk solids from sticking to the pot and burning the flavors of a chocolate chip cookie are yes chocolate but importantly also this butterscotchy cookie dough and you get that butterscotch flavor from first and foremost butter the higher quality the butter the more milk salads you'll have so butter is an emulsion of dairy fat water and milk solids now water boils at 212 fahrenheit the
actual temperature of the butter will not exceed that temperature until all the water has been boiled off you want to moderate your heat and keep it on the lower side because it can go from not at all browned to golden brown to burn really fast i'm going to turn it down a little i can still hear it boiling now but it's spoiling less it's becoming a little quieter and rather than having big bubbles i'm starting to see more of a fine foam this is about to start browning so now i have it on low and
i am letting it go until i see a shade or two past golden brown i want to get a really dark but not burned butter so this is looking good i think i'm getting to that point i'm going to turn off the heat there's some foam in the way but now you can see in the pot these are those brown bits you'll probably know if you burned it because one it's going to smell a little acrid and two it will look black this looks great now i'm going to add an ingredient you don't usually see
in chocolate chip cookies or any cookie and that is heavy cream two tablespoons it's cold i just took it out of the fridge i've now removed all of the water from the butter and i actually want to add some of it back in to help build a little bit of structure water is what interacts with flour to create gluten and i'm adding eggs so there's water there's a lot of water and egg whites but i basically need a little additional moisture to help create an emulsified dough at this point the recipe follows a very straightforward
cookie method which is working the sugar into the fat adding the eggs and then adding the dry ingredients and chocolate but before i do that i want this mixture to cool down because if i were to build the cookies started with hot butter i would not get the texture that i'm going for i would get something that was more brittle and also had that greasy quality to it so this has to cool down it's a very slow ice dispenser sorry [Music] i'm mixing in a metal bowl which is good for an ice bath because the
temperature change happens quickly and it will transfer a glass bowl is going to take a little longer but just sit here and stir it because what will happen if you leave it is you'll get like solid butter in contact with a bowl and then liquid on top and i want everything to be homogeneous so all you need is a whisk to make this the mixture is opaque and i had some little pieces that were colder so i'm just whisking until everything comes back together and is smooth and homogeneous i can still whisk it but it
has totally cooled you can also see that now the cream has emulsified in and i have something really smooth so to this i'm adding equal amounts of brown sugar and granulated sugar and i'm using dark brown sugar with brown sugar you get chewy with white sugar you get something crisp i just split the difference and i figured use equal amounts so it's three quarters of a cup each go ahead and add them in whisk this in i don't need to cream this until it's light and fluffy and pale like i was making a cake because
i don't want a lot of air in the batter so as long as your mixer is very smooth and homogenous that's all the mixing you need to do now i'm going to add my eggs these are large eggs whisk them in one at a time until well incorporated you're going to see a transformation in the texture it's going to take on a silkier appearance as the sugar dissolves in the additional water that you're adding from the egg white you can see that once you've done that brown butter the rest of it comes together very quickly
next i want to add my vanilla so maybe you caught our vanilla episode i have my homemade vanilla extract here please use a good quality vanilla extract i don't think you have to spring for a whole bean although if you wanted to splurge and add that it would not be bad i think that a high quality vanilla extract is really key to this recipe don't use the imitation stuff so whisk that in a tablespoon is a lot but it's such an important addition in the way it skews the whole flavor profile toward that butterscotchy yes
i guess i don't know that can set aside i'm going to mix the dry ingredients very straightforward i have two cups of all-purpose flour frankly when i'm making this at home i just add everything to the boiled mix but i'll go through the somewhat advisable but also extra step of mixing them separately now a teaspoon of baking soda baking soda is really important to cookie making for a couple reasons primarily it determines the spread of your cookies if you were to make these without baking soda they wouldn't spread very much in the oven and now
kosher salt i always use diamond crystal brand kosher salt and with diamond i'm adding a full two teaspoons of kosher salt if you're using morton use one teaspoon because it's saltier i'm gonna do one somewhat fussy but i think important step chopping up some of the chocolate you can use chips i don't really have a problem with chocolate chips i do prefer though something that is this shape these are sort of disks sometimes they're called febs which means beans and so they have a more bean like shape when they're whole in cookies they melt into
like these sheets of chocolate so i really like using disks in cookies i couldn't find the milk chocolate discs so i had a bar that i chopped up and i have five ounces of each type i love milk chocolate i know that maybe like a chocolate purist looks down on that i don't really care i like it i like the sweetness i like the creaminess i like how it melts so i'm using both i want one thing i learned something my husband taught me early on it's like why choose it's not a or b it's
answer c which is all of the above i'm gonna chop half of each kind of chocolate because it's sort of like the principle when i make pie dough it's like i really like having different sizes of the ingredients inside the cookies because i experience them differently when i eat them so i really like having all that contrast in the cookie what i really like about when i chop chocolate is you get like a little dust like this normally this is annoying but in this case i like it because when that gets added to the dough
it like blends into the dough and almost makes parts of the dough chocolate flavored but then you also get like this in there so i'm ready to finish the dough dry ingredients go in at this point i can whisk it the dough for these cookies is usually pretty loose if your butter was pretty solid you might need to switch to a spatula like my butter was pretty solid so let's switch back to my spatula to fold in the chocolate but make sure you get everything off the whisk okay so now i'm really liking the way
this looks it holds its shape but it's a little bit loose that's normal now add your chocolate you can see like it's not a hard recipe it comes together pretty fast once you have the butter i'm just making sure i get those particles of chocolate dust in there sometimes there's batters that i don't want to eat and then sometimes i make chocolate cookies and i would sit here and like bit by bit pick out a piece of chocolate a little scoop of the batter on it and just like so good we cannot bake this yet
we are not going to have chocolate cookies well we are going to have them soon because i made a swap but if you're making these at home and you reach this stage i'm sorry to say i'm going to ask you to wait [Music] there's an important process that happens when you age cookie dough and you chill it we'll talk about why as i scoop them but this is a pretty crucial step i understand the impulse to skip it but maybe don't maybe go ahead and wait if you don't have a scoop you can use a
quarter cup you can also just make them smaller there's no reason why i can't do a one and a half ounce portion i'm just doing it as i wrote it in the book make sure you have really level scoops and then i'm going to place them on this baking sheet now because i'm chilling them i don't need to space them out as i would if i were baking them so you can place these close together and in fact probably would all fit on a quarter sheet so you can see this is like a big mound
of dough so why am i asking you to age the cookie dough a few things happen when you let cookie dough sit in the fridge before baking what's happening is the butter is solidifying some of the sugar is recrystallizing and there's sort of like almost a curing process that happens and the end result is a cookie that is chewier has more developed flavor and like in every way is superior to a cookie that i bake straight off i say sort of at least 12 hours and up to 48 but even a couple hours will help
if you can muster four hours that's fine so i'm portioning them out before i age the dough because if i were to stick this whole bowl in the fridge it becomes one solid block of dough that's then very hard to portion so it's much easier to work with room temp dough for this stage i realize these are giant cookies but i do find that cookies this size give you more contrast with cookies this size between the crispy edge and the gooey chewy center so i didn't arrange them in the best pattern but i have 18
equal portions of dough two ounces each one thing you can do to get a really sort of extra photogenic look to your cookies is [Music] every couple cookies take a disc of chocolate and just kind of stick it on top and then that kind of melts into the cookie and we'll give you a really classic photo in a cookbook kind of look so now i'm going to cover this and chill the dough once the dough has set so that butter will harden you can actually take them off of the baking sheet and put them in
like a tupperware or in a bag and then store them that way and free up some space i'm gonna put a lid on here okay will that work yes so fortunately i planned ahead and i made some dough and i chilled it now i made the dough at this point three days ago so after two days in the fridge i transferred them to the freezer because i didn't want them to sit for too long in the fridge so i have some frozen cookie dough and i'm going to show you how to bake them so the
first thing is to preheat to 350. [Music] i have a confession to make i forgot to chop the chocolate when i made these so so these are not going to have the kind of chocolate distribution that is ideal so you can see these balls of dough they look a little bit different because they don't have those little tiny bits of chocolate that got distributed throughout so this is going to have more distinct textures between chocolate and cookie but that's okay so these spread out and get pretty large so i don't want to crowd them too
much i can fit six of these on a baking sheet [Music] so i'm at 350 these go into the oven i'm gonna rotate them halfway because sometimes the one that's on the bottom is getting less heat so there's less browning so i'll rotate halfway through and they go 18 to 20 minutes and i'm looking for a golden brown edge and a pale slightly shiny interior and then they kind of set as they cool [Music] the centers have puffed a little bit and that's because of the eggs and they will settle as they cool at this
stage the cookies are pretty delicate so i don't want to touch them i will let them cool on the baking sheets for five minutes or so and then i'm going to transfer them to a wire rack to finish cooling one thing that you get when you age the cookie dough is you get more of that wrinkly edge which i love so they look great even without my chopped chocolate edition so just gonna wait for them to cool i haven't had my lunch dessert yet i'm very excited to eat one of these and i want to
pick the one that i like best to show you to taste maybe it's might be this one it has this crispy edge and this still gooey warm center and i love how sort of browned and like golden and caramelized they get and then the center is still soft and delicious so i love you get like crispy chewy soft plus the melted chocolate it's everything i want in a cookie so i'm gonna go ahead and taste okay it's still really hot i probably should have waited but i can't okay oh my god they're really hot oh
god good cookie while a warm chocolate chip cookie it's certainly up there with the best desserts ever but even a room temperature cold frozen any all of the above chocolate chip cookie is so delicious i really really love having a mix of milk and dark chocolates in here and then to have the contrast between the gooey sweet and bittersweet chocolates and all of that brown buttery cookie dough is there's no finer challenge cookie for me in my book i really hope you try this recipe give brown butter a shot it is such an upgrade for
any cookie recipe you have especially chocolate chip cookies and it's worth seeking out a good chocolate and a good vanilla extract for these thank you for watching love showing you dessert person recipes and we'll be back with more and in the meantime i'm gonna pour myself a glass of milk thank you for watching like and subscribe [Music]
